Then Came You (35 page)

B
y July, things had calmed down enough that I felt able to leave the apartment for a while. Annie was staying two days and one night each week, Tia was on duty every night Monday through Friday, and Jules, who I thought I’d never see again after our uncomfortable introduction, had surprised me by calling the week after we’d met and volunteering to babysit. “I don’t know much about kids,” she said, looking as terrified as I must have been the first time I gave her Rory to hold.

“It’s not hard,” I’d said. She’d handled the baby like she was made of glass, exclaiming over her every sigh and coo. The first Sunday I’d stayed with her. The second time I’d left her with bottles of breast milk and my cell-phone number and gotten on the subway to spend an evening with Darren for the first time since Rory’s arrival. Unbeknownst to him, I had an agenda: I wanted to get drunk, and then, as my old roommate would have put it, I wanted to get laid. I wanted to behave like a regular twenty-four-year-old, a woman with no vision past her own eyelashes, no plans beyond the next day, and no responsibilities beyond her own job.

Darren lived in Chelsea, in a building with an elevator but no doorman and disconcertingly narrow hallways. His apartment had, as I could have predicted, a flat-screen TV as its main
piece of furniture, but other than that, it was surprisingly un-repulsive. There was an indigo-and-orange vintage poster for Orangina on the kitchen wall and a big leather couch in the living/dining room. There was no space for a kitchen table, but Darren had lined up three wood-and-metal stools in front of the narrow breakfast bar. When I arrived, he was unpacking a bag full of Chinese take-out boxes. There was fried rice and egg rolls, chicken lo mein and spicy prawns. I filled my plate, and we sat together on the couch.

“So?” asked Darren. “How’s motherhood?” He was barefoot in his chinos, wearing a T-shirt advertising some band I’d never heard of, and his horrible glasses. He needed a haircut . . . but, to me, he’d never looked cuter.

“It’s interesting,” I said carefully. I understood the problem, the situation I was in. When Darren and I had started spending time together, I was single and unencumbered. Now I had a baby. The fact that the baby was not technically mine did not, in the end, matter much. I was a woman with a child, and that did not make me more desirable than I’d been when we’d met.

“Any word from India?” he asked.

I shook my head. The truth was, I wasn’t looking for my disappearing stepmother too hard. With Annie and Jules and Tia in and out of the apartment, with the baby doing baby-like things that are probably boring to everyone in the world except for the people to whom the baby belongs—
She smiled! She almost rolled over! She’s holding up her head!
—I felt interested, engaged, needed in a way I didn’t think I’d never been needed in my life, and if, sometimes, I was so tired it was all I could do to keep from dozing off in the tub, if I missed my colleagues at Kohler’s, if I missed my freedom, it seemed a reasonable trade-off for a life I liked much better than the one I’d had. I had a tribe, a crew, friends in Annie and Tia and Jules. The baby, too, had grown on me. I’d even started posting cute pictures on my Facebook page.

“So what do you think will happen?” Darren asked.

“I don’t know.” In truth, I thought that what would happen had happened already: Rory had been born, I’d brought her home, and now I would raise her. But, for Darren’s sake, I was willing to play along with the idea that things could still change. “I could put her up for adoption. I could sell her on eBay. Billionaire’s baby. I bet I could get a nice price.”

“I don’t think,” Darren said, “that eBay’s allowed to traffic in actual people.”

I looked at him hopefully. “Craigslist?”

He shook his head. I pushed a single sesame noodle around the edge of my plate, where it had already completed half a dozen laps, like it was training for a noodle marathon. Since my father’s death, I’d lost eleven pounds. I was a grown-up, I told myself to shake off the memories of my dad. I was a grown woman with a college degree and a job I could return to, a baby I was caring for, maybe even a boyfriend, and so what if my life wasn’t perfect? Whose life was? Lots of people missed their parents, plenty of people had it worse. Jules had told me only the barest contours of her story, and that was plenty for me to be horrified. Still, I couldn’t keep from imagining it: my dad, walking through my bedroom door the way he had when I was little and had bad dreams. He’d bring me a glass of water, escort me to and from the bathroom, then sit with me, watching over me, my canopied bed creaking under his weight, until I fell asleep again.

“I can’t figure out why they picked me,” I said. “Why me, and not Trey and Marissa?” They had a baby, they had baby stuff, they had a nanny already, not to mention an apartment that was big enough to accommodate another. My father had bought them the place as a wedding gift.

“Maybe your father thought they had their hands full,” Darren offered. I nodded, wondering if that was it, or if maybe he thought that a new baby wouldn’t be as well loved as Trey and
Marissa’s own daughter. “Or maybe India was the one who picked you.”

I winced. “Doubt it. We didn’t get along.”

He used his chopsticks to help himself to more prawns. “Yes, I sensed that when you came to have her investigated.”

My cheeks flushed. “I wasn’t wrong about India.”

“You weren’t wrong about her past,” Darren said. “I just wonder if maybe she’d changed. Anyhow,” he said hastily as I opened my mouth to tell him that, clearly, India hadn’t changed a bit, that she was a user and a gold digger who’d killed my father and abandoned her child and more or less ruined my life. “Is the food okay? You’re not eating.”

I popped a snow pea in my mouth. “It’s fine.”

“If you want my opinion, I think India made the right choice with you.”

“You think I’m the maternal type?” That, at least, would explain why he’d never done more than kiss me.

“I think,” he said, “they probably wanted the baby to have all the advantages that you guys had. Which means...”

“Money,” I concluded.

“Not just money. Living in New York City. Being exposed to things. Art, theater...”

“The homeless guy I saw pooping in a trash can in the subway station this morning...”

“No kidding,” said Darren. “Your subway station has one of those guys, too?”

I looked around his kitchen. There was a coffee machine, a stainless-steel blender, a gallon-size container of protein powder beside it, and a toaster oven in the corner, but no liquor. I needed liquor. Booze was part of my plan. I wanted to be a party girl, laughing, half naked, letting a stranger slurp tequila out of my belly button without thinking about germs or disease. I wanted
to be naked, skin to skin, with this boy I liked. “Do you have anything to drink?”

He swung open the refrigerator. “We’ve got water, light beer, orange juice . . .” He gave the plastic container a swish, then held it up to the light, squinting, before opening the top to take a sniff. “Maybe not orange juice.”

“I mean, drink drink.” I slid off my stool and started going through his cabinets. The first one held only three dinner-size plates, two cereal bowls, two glasses, and two mismatched coffee mugs. The second featured an assortment of canned soups and pasta. I held one up. “Beefaroni?”

“Don’t knock it,” he said.

The third cupboard yielded a bottle of whiskey. I took one of his two glasses, pried a few cubes out of an ancient, ice-crusted metal tray I found in the freezer, poured myself a shot, and gulped it down.

My eyes watered, and I felt my face turn red. “Whoa.” I filled my glass again as Darren watched, frowning.

I sipped my second drink, and took off my shoes, and pulled my hair out of its headband, shaking it free. “Are you worried about me?”

“Should I be?”

I gave my hair another shake and downed my second shot. The mouth of the whiskey bottle clanked against the lip of the glass as I poured a refill. Darren put his hand over mine.

“Hey. Seriously. Easy there.”

I shook him off, put the glass to my mouth and knocked it back. My head was fuzzy, but it wasn’t an unpleasant sensation, and my chest and belly felt warm. Darren was watching me from the sofa. Even in his dorky glasses, he looked delicious, all broad shoulders and solid thighs, with his face slightly sunburned from an afternoon playing Frisbee in the park and his
hair flopping over his eyebrows. Without planning, without thinking, I crossed the room, straddled his legs, and kissed him. He made a noise like “mmph,” his hands stiff at his sides and his lips motionless against mine. For a second, I was certain that I’d misread the signs, that he’d push me away, gently but firmly, and tell me our single kiss had been an act of kindness rather than a romantic overture, and that, while he’d always be my friend and would occasionally be my employee, he just didn’t think of me that way.

Then he slid one hand around the back of my neck, pulling me closer. He stood, lifting me in his arms, cradling me, and I closed my eyes, feeling warm and drunk and, for an instant, dizzy with guilt. Why should I be enjoying this, enjoying anything, with my own father barely cold in his grave, with a baby at home, needing my care? But as Darren held me against his chest, I felt comforted and safe.

“Do you need to make a Franklin list?” I asked, pulling off his glasses and tossing them, harder than perhaps was technically necessary, onto the coffee table.

“Huh?”

“Pros and cons. Run the numbers.”

“Pipe down, nugget,” he said. He carried me into his bedroom and tossed me on the bed, which was made up with a dark-blue bedspread and a pair of pillows in striped blue-and-white pillowcases. I bounced, and giggled convincingly, like I’d been doing it all my life. Then he was lying on top of me, his chest crushing my breasts, his hips pressing against mine. The air rushed out of my body and, with it, my grief, and for the next little while I forgot everything that had happened, and all of my responsibilities, and everything but the feeling of the two of us together.

•  •  •

When it was over, I leaned over and kissed the narrow bridge of his nose. “That was something,” I said.

“Uh.” He was lying on his side, naked, sweating, adorable. His hair was messy, and his face, without those terrible glasses, looked younger and softer and altogether lovable.
My boyfriend,
I thought, and it was all I could do not to hold myself, to jump out of the bed and go singing into the streets. Lying beside him, still slightly tipsy, the world felt reordered, and the tasks ahead of me felt manageable. Maybe I could convince Annie to stay long-term. I could even invite her husband and her sons. There was room for them all. I could help her husband find a job. Maybe Jules would find child care so enjoyable that she’d end up being like an aunt to Rory, coming over once or twice a week. We’d be a tribe, a team, a village . . . us and our men.

I poked Darren’s freckled shoulder until I was sure I had his attention. “Do you like kids?” I asked.

He opened his eyes and peered at me. “For dinner?”

“Ha.” I rummaged under the covers until I located my panties. I’d need new panties, if someone was going to be seeing them on a regular basis. I’d have to add it to the list. “Get all the jokes out of your system now. Because if you’re going to be a father...”

Now both his eyes were open. “What?”

“Well, a stepfather. A step-boyfriend-father.” The whiskey had made me merry, like one of those laughing girls I’d always watched with my mouth pressed in a disapproving line. Who knew it was this easy, to find a new personality in a bottle?

“Wait. Wait.” He was blinking at me, holding the sheets to his chest. “Slow down for a minute here.”

I perched on the bed in my underpants, legs tucked underneath me and tilted coquettishly to the side.

“Look,” he said, sitting up and holding me by the shoulders.
“I like you, Tina. I like you a lot. But . . . I mean, the thing is...”

I jumped off the bed before he could say any more, before he could elucidate the reasons he didn’t want me. I scooped up whatever clothes I saw on the floor, feeling dizzy as I bent over, and hurried into the bathroom.
Wrong,
I thought. I’d been right about India, but I’d been wrong about him.

A second later, he was banging on the door. “Hey, Bettina. Can we talk about this?”

I decided that we couldn’t . . . because, really, what was there to say? “I need to go.” I combed my fingers through my hair, washed my hands and face, rinsed my mouth with water, and opened the door, pushing past him to where I’d left my shoes. Darren had pulled on his boxer shorts. His hair stood up in spikes, and his face still had that tender look without his glasses. He touched my cheek, then my hair. “Stay with me.”

Are you my boyfriend?
I wanted to ask . . . but the words reminded me of a book I’d read when I was little.
Are you my mother?
The mess of my life came crashing down, leaving me breathless. My father was dead, my mother was gone, and I was responsible for a baby who wasn’t mine. It seemed, in that moment, more than I could bear, more than anyone should have to.

I pressed my lips against his shoulder. “I need to go.” I kissed his cheek, then the corner of his mouth, thinking that he wouldn’t try to keep me, so I was surprised when he took my shoulders and held me motionless in front of him.

“Hey. Listen.” He paused, scratching at the top of his head. “I don’t know if I like babies. I’ve never really thought about it. I wasn’t expecting to have to think about it for a while, you know?”

I nodded. I knew.

“But, the thing is, I like you. I like you a lot.” My heart was rising, rising. I wanted to jump in the air, or into his arms again.
“It’s like, if I found out you had, I don’t know, herpes or something.”

My heart stopped rising. My mouth fell open. “Are you actually equating my half sister with a venereal disease?” I asked.